How to Make Fat Drum & Bass Reeses

How I make reese basses from scratch in Serum. Everything you need to know if you're a beginner, and some cool tricks if you already know a little bit about reeses.

In this tutorial
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    My notes from this video

    01

    Just a detuned saw and a little distortion

    Watch 0:28

    A reese bass is just a saw wave, detuned, with a little bit of distortion. That's it. Take it two octaves down, and the higher you go, the more it gets that speed up womp effect. The more I detune it, the faster that high stuff goes.

    02

    Send the note to the detune

    Watch 0:58

    The one thing you really should look for in a reese is that speed up effect. Send the note to the detune and make that curve where lower notes do nothing and higher notes add more detune. You don't want it really detuned when you're low, because that is just dirty.

    I do the detune on oscillator B, two octaves down with a unison of two, so I can control it separately from oscillator A and take down its level.

    Serum with osc A and osc B both two octaves down, osc B on unison 2 with a modulation ring on its detune knob, and the Note curve flat on the low notes and rising steeply on the high notes
    Osc B on unison 2. The note curve only adds detune on the high notes.
    03

    Keep the sub out of the high pass

    Watch 3:01

    A high pass 24 in front of the distortion gives you a really nice alive reese, because it resonates a little bit at the mids. It also cuts the sub, and if you don't have a sub, you don't have a reese. Open the sub, take it down two octaves and make sure it isn't selected in the filter, or you cut it again. Distorting that sub together with the saws is what gives you that nice crunchy sound.

    Serum oscillator page with the sine sub on octave -2, osc A and osc B two octaves down, and the filter on High 24 with only A and B routed into it
    High 24 on osc A and B only. The sub stays out of the filter.
    04

    Let the LFO speed up with the note

    Watch 4:08

    The detune already speeds up on the higher notes, so make an LFO do the same. Disable the BPM on LFO 1 and send the note to its rate, so it's slow on a low note and fast on a high note. Put that LFO on the filter cutoff and the higher you play, the faster it wobbles. That's a cool trick that I don't really see being used a lot.

    05

    Widen the highs with chorus and dimension

    Watch 7:00

    You can detune a reese even more with a chorus. Aim it at around 10,000 hertz, because you're trying to really widen up the highs, and take down the depth.

    I also like hyper dimension, just the dimension instead of the detune, in front of the distortion. Take down the mix of both a little bit. It really comes down to mixing it.

    What I use in this video

    FL Studio·Serum·LFOTool

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